Comments

>On other development fronts it is said that RedHat's new beta includes a KDE
>version that is made to look like GNOME. Icons, widget-style and kicker apps
>have been replaced, as it has been whispered in the trees.

Mostly off of what I have heard on IRC. I was planning on downloading this weekend, since I have to support RH for a client. So far all i know for sure is off of the changelog. There where some pretty wacked out patches applied from looks of it. They even say "Removeing KDE About Box", its pretty obvious they are looking to shut down KDE for good here.

Personally Id like to call RH on this one, but our liberal packageing policy has allowed them to fork KDE and trash it for the world to see. I dont know though, RH has been curiously silent on the issue thus far. Im waiting on their official response before I really get bent out of shape over this.

Personally I am more interested about this eOne/OpenOffice thing going down... Isnt this what RH has been talking about for their desktop linux?

The "About KDE" dialog doesn't explain at all what KDE actually is. Seeing that it is more than likely that people are using KDE apps in GNOME, this could be a problem. They shouldn't have to care about the difference and I think it's obvious that this was the thought behind the removal. But you should just ask RedHat if this concerns you.

Fine, let's wait for the answer before we draw any further conclusions please. :)

"But until they explain, I am pissed. Of course in the great order of things,
the anger of Roberto Alsina plays a very small role."

Well... Right. ;) In the end it's all about serving the *user* and I hope that the KDE project as a whole stands behind this intention. Removing references to products is very well in the interest of a user, that's the same reason why there is absolutely no reference to Ximian (not even Evolution) in the menusystem unless you actually start the application (and then you have to launch the about box to see the Ximian logo the first time). All kind of branding has nothing to do in a GUI (even the red hat startmenu is questionable, but I don't think a foot or "K" is better ;)).
I'm not saying that copyright and "about" information shouldn't exist, of course it should be available somewhere from the KDE desktop.

This is tiresome and repetitive. Fine, you are against this. Bitch if you want to. It will not change anything anyway. You also probably misunderstood me. Ximian isn't doing anything, it's RedHat which has removed the branding of Ximian Evolution not Ximian itself. My only point is that it's done for a reason with a _lot_ of software. Nobody is complaining about this but KDE people. Again. This is really not a good attitude if you want to get the Linux desktop to more users.
Heck, I'm getting the impression that it would be easier to just fork the KDE desktop as "RedHat Desktop Environment" or something like that. ;) So unflexible... A shame for free software.

This is bad. Why are they doing this? They seem to be actively trying to destroy us by making us look bad. What is the point of all these stupid changes to cripple KDE and make us look like (or worse than) GNOME?

When you say Red Hat has been silent, does this mean they have been queried on the issue? Why should there be an official response if nobody asked them?

mmh, u say really a lot of sh****. sorry,. but I used limbo, and kde doesn't at all look bad. I think it's normal,if redhat trys to keep a consistent look and feel between all windowmanager in their ditribution. I thing this are only well-know trolls "gnome versus kde" and "redhat versus kde". U don't blame mandrake for their default kde look that is lot more ugly as that from mandrake!

You need to try it out before you rush to judgement. Redhat has stated that they are going to be supporting the desktop market, which means that they are going to be supporting BOTH gnome and kde. It is alot easier to support both desktops if the menus/icons look the same.

Most desktop users won't know that they are using KDE or GNOME, just the applcation 'x' is not working and they want to fix it. Having two desktops with completely different looks and feels is a support nightmare.

This is the link that got me interested:
- Added patch to remove "about KDE" menu item from help menu (bug #67287)
This effectively removes the about KDE part of the menu. While this isnt in violation of any license, it does make it so you dont know an app is a KDE app. Why would they do this.

The LGPL says in section 6 that you can "distribute [a program linked to a LGPL library] ...
If the work during execution displays copyright notices, you must include the
copyright notice for the Library among them"

The "About KDE" dialog is the copyright notice provided by kdelibs.

Removing it from kdelibs with the purpose of it not being displayed by the programs
is probably a violation of the LGPL, not to mention a pretty stupid thing to do, which will surely cause, if true, a violent backlash against Red Hat. I would be surprised if even
GNOME supported such a thing.

In any case, I don't think removing copyright notices is legal EVER, and that is what
that patch would do. It sure ain't ethical.

KDE provides sources, you know that. What distros and packagers do to KDE is their own business. Not a big deal. All desktop-oriented distros (and RedHat is not one of these) have KDE as default desktop.

' Is it time to take a more agressive stance on packageing so we can keep some control how KDE looks?'

I am afraid you can not do that (GPL).

How KDE looks like? Good question :) Take a look at the screenshots on kde-look.org or even on kde.org and you will see that KDE has thousands of different looks (though mostly MacOSX-Aqua-like and WinXP-like). You can download gnome icon sets from kde-look.org (BTW, they are excellent) and many of gnome's (sawfish) window decorations ported to IceWM for KDE. We also used to have a gtk-theme importer for KDE 2xx.

I guess we can all repeat the mantra of "KDE only provides source..." over and over and hope for the best. Unfortunately on this side of the pond RH == Linux. I have only seen a handfull of companies that dont think otherwise. Lucky IBM is nice enough to help break this idea, but companies like Sun and HP, seem to ignore SuSE (a damn fine desktop linux dist, and server for that matter) when they look at linux on the desktop.

What I am talking about is a more reliable method of getting packages made. SuSE and MDK dont seem to have a problem with this (outside of a few bumps and scrapes because users upgrade from stock configs over time), so why cant RH seem to get it right? I mean we have debian package package information in CVS, why cant we have maintained spec files?

Just some thoughts of latenight frustration as I get Solaris to compile KOffice... Ironic how KDE 3.1 seems to run better on Solaris than my Gnome CD that I got right from Sun... poor sods took it on that one...

Wow, you got KDE3 to work on Solaris? Looking at the build requirements, it looks like you'd have to upgrade the entire build environment just to get it to build (and this was Solaris 9 I was looking at!).

Hey, question, does KDM work (XDMCP included)? With the KDE 2.2.2 they shipped with Solaris 9 I can't get XDMCP to work with KDM.

Yes a kind company was nice enough to donate some solaris HW and CPU cycles.

I used stock Solaris 8.0 with gcc 2.95 off of the opensource CD. I added the SSL packages and a small patch to get /dev/urandom to work. The only part I have not had much luck with is the Motif part so NS plugins dont work.

If I can have a spare second here I wanted to get Beta1 snapshot packages out, but the way its looking here I may not get packages out until Beta2 because I am still cleaning up stuff like KSysguard.

KDM also works, but you have to "tickle" it a little. We are getting close to fixing that too. I have patches to make dtlogin show KDE or to use KDM, whatever is more stable Ill put in CVS.

Stay tuned.

BTW the most effective methods for getting HW and OS support for KDE on your pet platform is to either do it your self or donate: cpu cycles, beer, hardware or software ;)

Hi, Ian, glad the Ultra is working well for you. I'm doing some more with the Grid Engine as I get the time, so pretty soon I may be able to let you do some network cluster compiling! We're up to 31 workstations now, so that should result in some speedy 'make' times...

We temporarily halted our compiling of 3.0.2 since 3.0.3 was released. We'd like to do 3.0.3 with GCC 3.2, 64-bit.

There is quite a lot of negative reactions about the UI changes to KDE here. Believe me, there's quite a bit of it from Gnome people as well. Red Hat has done the same thing to Gnome as it has to KDE, i.e. replaced the default look'n'feel, menu system and so on with their own designs. If you're worried that KDE now looks like Gnome, rest assured that it doesn't. Indeed, the most common complaint among Gnomers is that it makes Gnome look far too much like KDE. :)

As much as we dislike these changes (and yes, I'm one of those that aren't too happy with it), they are making a point, and an important one. They want to deliver a desktop to their customers that feel integrated. That is pretty important to them, and to the majority of their aimed-for user base (corporate desktops). Thus the common theme and common menu structure (another peeve from the Gnome camp). As other posters here has pointed out, most users do not care, and do not _want_ to care about arcana like what desktop environmnet an app belongs to. This of course makes you - and us - pretty uncomfortable.

Another policy they are enforcing with RH8 is that there should be only one default app for every function. That is not to say there can not be several overlapping apps, just that there should be one default, and one only. For KDE, it apparently means Konqueror will play second fiddle to Mozilla; it also means Galeon is in the exact same situation as Konqueror. Having played with the beta, I have repeatedly become surprised that _my_ particular favourite app is not available; it's been easy enough to pull it in from the CD:s, to be sure. Again, I get somewhat frustrated over these choices, and again, I fully understand why this is a good thing for the majority of users.

Fortunately, it seems it is quite easy to tweak the desktop for all of us to quickly regain the eye-candy and apps of our choice. And, yes, it probably _is_ preferable that geeks like us will need to do a bit of tweaking over having a lot of not-very-knowledgeable users attempting to get an integrated desktop (and failing).

Again, I'm not here to troll or anything, I just wanted to point out that Gnome people seem no more happy with the beta than you are, and that there are a lot of good, solid reasons for RH to do what they are.

I think you are spot on. IMHO, RedHat is entirely within it's rights to modify KDE to suit there customers needs, as long as they release there modifications in accordance with the appropriate license. I fail to see how this is any different from the numerous companies that modify Free Software applications to meet there particular marketing/customer needs. Lycoris, Lindows, Xandros, Ximian... They all rebrand and modify FS/OS and there associated icons.

I do not particularly care if RedHat patches KDE to remove the 'About KDE' box. AFAIK, the box does not contain any licensing information and therefore it is not against the license. I am only concerned that they release the patch under the LGPL ;-)

Well said. In the past I would never consider using Redhat because KDE was not well supported. The new Redhat has them on equal footing and I could easily chnage the look and feel to Keramik. Menus maybe not, but I could still easily setup to use Konqueror, Koffice and any other K app.

I am definately more impressed with Redhat over the zero improvements found in Mandrake.

I am still plodding along with Red Hat 7. In a preview Kde 2 rpm (1.93) they removed Kpanel!. Boy am I pissed (even though it's two years old).
I'll rather use Mandrake (but my cd's keep on getting freakin' stuffed)

For crying out loud its open source. They can change, remove, add, or do anything they want to pretty much... Do I think it's right to remove developer info? no I don't, but they are free to do whatever they please. Isn't no different from what Mandrake was doing awhile back. Change some code here and there and voila... RedHat is Mandrake... did you see redhat references all over the Mandrake distro? Didn't think so... If they are that concerned about what is added and removed, then close the source to the public. If not then stop the bitchin...

Why should KDE and Gnome not both have an identical default look? From the user perspective it would only make sense if Gnome and KDE apps behaved the same.

And obviously neither KDE nor GNOME would ever give up their default look themselves. Therefore only a third party (like Redhat) could do it. It was discussed on gnome-kde meetings before though, IIRC.
Maybe we could even use the look they use (together with GNOME) and call it the freedesktop standard?

Futhermore it is sensible to let KDE mimic GNOME, because GNOME is simpler and has less advanced features. Gnome could never mimic KDE with keramik.

If KDE were not just adapted but crippled, users would complain, so Redhat would be stupider than I think they are to do it. You will still be able to use e.g. keramik and so on, I think.

I wouldn't believe rumours about ripping out KDE "About" menu entries until I hear them from a reliable source.

I can see makeing gnome apps look like kde apps when you are in kde or vis versa, but to completely remove the look and feel is something different. If i want to use KDE its because I like KDE, and wish to use KDE, then again I am strange...

The point is that users don't care one bit about GTK or QT or Gnome or KDE as long as the apps cooperate nicely. If they look the same -- GREAT.

So I can see the reasoning behind changing the "look" of kde applications to become gnomish. I can not see any sense in offering a reduced, minimalist version of the KDE as a desktop option. KDE users will not accept this anyways. Those who use Gnome will never see it.

Best reaction: Tell any Redhat user coming to KDE for support to get a real KDE.

If I worked at Mandrake or SuSE, I would look forward to the next Redhat release :-)

"If I worked at Mandrake or SuSE, I would look forward to the next Redhat release :-)"

I wouldn't, because outside of zealot-websites, there is some real excitement about the betas, as they really kick ass as a desktop operating system (that's what I heard). Also this seems to become their best KDE integration ever. :)
You (KDE devs and fans) really should calm down a little bit. RedHat does a lot of changes to KDE but not half as much changes as they do to GNOME. They aren't doing this to cripple anything but for the better of the user.
And of course all the fancy Keramik, Crystal, etc stuff will still be included so they are just a click away (or ten, depends on kcontrols efficiency ;)). And no functionality will be ripped (silly idea).

Haha. ;) No seriously I think they want to remove it as it won't help the user. Think about it, as we already said quite a lot of times, new users don't care about KDE and GNOME, they just want it to work. So they install GNOME, use KMail and go to the help menu, now there is a "About KDE" box. Hmm. They might click it and maybe they think they are running KDE (which they aren't). However, why isn't it enough to just place the "About application" in the help menu like everyone else does too (consistency could be another rational for this action)?
I hope though that the about KDE box can be accessed from another place (in GNOME you get it by right clicking on the panel). If not, this could indeed be a problem (but I'm sure that RedHat would be more than willing to solve it if someone tells them). In the worst case it could be placed somewhere in the KDE menu.